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Thursday, July 22, 2010

Tornado, Pt. 3 of 5 (I think)

There seemed to be a gasp as every individual saw Hurt, with the ends of the buildings collapsing. As we were walking, a National Guardsman with a chainsaw approached the guys he saw walking and told us that eight guys were trapped in Watters, and asked us to come help. I handed my computer to Sarah and we started off to Watters. Katie Kulow and Sarah asked us frantically where they were supposed to go, and we told them to keep moving and go to the PAC. When we were walking to Watters, we began to see even more of the damage. When we looked to ward Hurt, all we saw was rubble. We slogged through the mud and were quite tempted to run. The guardsman told us to conserve our energy, we would need it and there was no telling how long we would be out there. As we walked up to Watters we could see the end of the Commons building by the light of numerous emergency response vehicles. It looked as if that end had been burned and stripped and then we saw the truth, that there was only about 10 feet left of the building still standing, the rest was in a pile of rubble. We followed the guardsman over some rubble to near where a firefighter was trying to get a guy out from under the rubble. The guardsman told us to wait for something to do, so Kyle, Austin, a few others and I waited. We heard a voice from under the rubble of Watters Commons. I was later told it was probably Matt Taylor (which he later confirmed), yelling "Get me out of here!" His voice had a blood curdling tone and was full of fear. The firefighter calling for an airbag and telling him to "stay calm, we're getting you out, you will be ok." We were standing there, some emergency personnel telling us to wait to help lift people out, others telling us to get to White Hall. We kept standing there for a few minutes in the midst of the chaos until they started yelling for all students to go to White Hall while someone else yelled that there were enough emergency workers there already and they didn't need anymore help. So Austin, Kyle, and I decided we would head over to White Hall as they told us to, though we wished they had let us stay and help.